Luxury movie theater coming to University Town Center

Move over CineBistro, iPic is coming to town. Mark Chait, executive director of leasing for Manatee County’s Benderson Development Co., confirmed Monday that iPic, a luxury dining and movie experience, is slated for an upcoming development on the east portion of the University Town Center area. The iPic theater was visible in a rendering that Benderson is displaying of that project at three-day International Council of Shopping Centers annual ReCon conference in Las Vegas.The Boca Raton-based iPic has a dozen theater/restaurants in the United States, including two in Florida: Boca Raton and North Miami Beach. The chain also has theaters in Austin, Fairview and Houston, Texas; Bolingbrook and South Barrington, Illinois; Glendale, Wisconsin; Los Angeles and Pasadena, California; North Bethesda, Maryland; Redmond, Washington; and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Some iPic seats are equipped with an in-theater service button that allows the moviegoer to place food and drink orders throughout show, which would be a first for the Sarasota-Manatee area. CineBistro has a last call for service before the movie starts.

The new theater will be the second of its kind in the Sarasota region, joining Cobb’s CineBistro at Westfield Southgate, which opened this year and which was expected to be the turning point for that struggling mall. CineBistro opened on the former site of Saks Fifth Avenue, which left Southgate for the Mall at University Town Center when it opened in 2014.